Drinking Buddies
by which-chartreuse
Summary: It was not entirely clear to either of them how they had become drinking buddies, but there it was. Josie's was now another stop on Jessica's list of places to disappear inside a bottle. I don't write log lines for a living, so please excuse this terrible summary. Rated for language and substance abuse. See author's note inside for spoiler warnings.


**A/N:** Mild spoilers/vague references to for _Daredevil_ seasons 1 and 2, _Jessica Jones_ seasons 1 and 2, and _Punisher_ season 1. Mild spoilers for _Defenders_ character death. **  
**I wrote this earlier in the summer, right after school let out and I had binged season two of _Jessica Jones_. I futzed with the timelines so that the end of JJ's season two and _Punisher_ season one would have aligned, and this takes place in the winter, after both, even though JJs2 seemed more like a spring or summer setting. I guess I'm itching for cold weather or something. Part of me wants to keep writing this friendship and extend this story, but I don't know where to take it yet. We shall see. Please feel free to review and let me know if you're interested in it continuing. Thanks for reading.

* * *

It was not entirely clear to either of them how Karen Page and Jessica Jones had become drinking buddies, but there it was. Josie's was now another stop on Jessica's list of places to disappear inside a bottle when drinking alone finally got too depressing even for her. Unlike Jessica, Karen was still trying to limit her solo drinking as much as possible, but having Jessica around meant there were ample opportunities to break with sobriety.

Jessica knew more than she let on, and Karen knew that. She was grateful to the P.I. for leaving those wounds unpicked. And for her end, Karen had uncovered more about the raven-haired woman than she thought Jessica would be comfortable with, so she sat on the facts. But Karen wasn't convinced Jessica didn't know that she knew.

Their acquaintance was a complex web of meaningful looks and things left unsaid, and they both seemed fine with that.

Very occasionally, though, Jessica would break through the threshold of her constant buzz and actually reach a level of wasted neither of them had been sure a powered person like her was capable of. Those nights, Karen usually stayed under the legal limit, listening dutifully as Jessica rambled, about Trish, about her mother, about how awful and worthless human beings were. And Jessica ended up passed out on Karen's bathroom floor.

Or in her bathtub.

Or on the battered sofa in the living room.

Mostly, though, they drank and talked about nothing. Karen was working on an exposé about the black market for "Incident" technology that had been running out of City Hall of all places. Jessica was tailing a math teacher's wife while she ran errands and got pedicures, and did absolutely nothing interesting, while her husband was teaching prep school brats the Pythagorean theorem.

"That's triangles, right?" Jessica squinted at Karen over the row of shots on the table in front of them.

"Yeah," Karen confirmed, then recited the theorem. "A squared plus B squared equals C squared."

"Well this guy is a square, for sure. And so is his boring-ass wife. But he's paying for these, so…" she gestured to the shots.

Karen giggled before she could stop herself. It wasn't her place to judge the sad and jealous of New York City any more than it was Jessica's, really. But sometimes the mundane lives of others were hilariously absurd compared to theirs.

"Drink up, drink up, drink up," Jessica crowed, changing the subject, and downed three tiny glasses in quick succession. Karen made it to two before getting distracted by the third in her hand.

"So tiny…" she whispered.

"Uh oh," Jessica quietly exclaimed. "No more for blondie."

"Huh?"

"You're the babysitter, Karen. I don't do that holding your hair back shit."

But an hour later, that was exactly what she was doing.

"Just-just punch me, Jess," Karen slurred as she groped for some toilet paper to wipe her mouth. "Just put me out of my misery and let me sleep it off."

"Concussions and alcohol do not mix," Jessica quipped as she regathered Karen's blonde locks in her fist. "Do you think you're done."

Karen moaned before lurching back over the toilet bowl. Everything coming out of her was a liquid, but things were starting to turn a bilious green. Jessica cringed and averted her eyes, but kept her grasp on Karen's hair.

"Now I'm done," the journalist groaned over the roar of the flush. "For a while."

The two leaned back against the ugly pink tub in Jessica's bathroom, legs stretched out in front of them on the floor. Jessica compared her black boots to Karen's nude flats, the holes in her jeans to Karen's pencil skirt, and sighed. The situation was uncomfortably familiar, recalling the many times Jessica had begged her adoptive sister to lay off the drugs and ended up supporting Trish through another attempt to get clean. When Karen's head dropped to her shoulder, the flashback felt even more real.

"Not that I'm not digging this bonding moment, but do you think you can stand?" Jessica asked.

Karen moaned some more in response.

"You can have the bed," Jessica offered.

"No, no, you go. I'll be fine here," Karen murmured, her throat raw. "Just, uh… will you bring me some water?"

Karen's quiet self-reliance was refreshingly different from the memory of Trish's binges and eventual purges, and the creepy familiarity of the situation faded out.

"No, come on," Jessica insisted, climbing to her feet. "You'll hate it in the morning if I let you pass out here." She was tempted to just lift the woman up and carry her to the bed herself, but knew that wouldn't be necessary. She did offer a hand, though, which Karen gladly took.

Karen lay back against the pillow, her arm immediately thrown over her eyes. Jessica brought her the glass of water, and set a bucket from under the sink next to the bed.

"Here you go. Just in case," she said. "I'll be on the couch if you need anything."

"No, Jess. I don't… Don't let me…" Karen sputtered, her sentence never coming to a close. The arm came away from her face and she struggled to sit up again. "It's your bed."

"It's fine. I've slept on that couch many times."

"But you don't have to. We can… we can share," Karen asserted, squinting at Jessica through the light of the bedside lamp and patting the mattress beside her.

"Yeah, okay," Jessica finally relented. Karen sank back against the pillows, arm returning to its position over her eyes.

"Good. Just, please, turn out that light."

Jessica obliged.

She kicked off her boots and paused to consider the pros and cons of wriggling out of her torn up jeans with a practical stranger lying in her bed. But she wasn't really a stranger. She was Karen Page, the miraculous journalist from the _Bulletin_ , who had survived a frame job, several kidnappings, and a terrorist bombing in the last two years alone. Karen might not be her friend, exactly, but Jessica had a feeling if there were really anything left to wonder about, the blonde would have spilled by now.

Jessica reached her customary level of nighttime undress and slid under the covers. Karen was already snoring softly, her mouth hanging open, and Jessica stifled a smile at the uncharacteristic sound emerging from the usually well-kept and put together blonde. The P.I. rolled to her side, facing away from her drunk bedfellow, and swiftly fell asleep.

The next time Jessica ended up spilling her guts in Karen's bathroom, she didn't turn down Karen's offer to share the bed.

1081

This went on for over a month, starting right around New Year's. The two of them would exchange simple texts like "you free?" or "thirsty?" before ending up sitting across from one another a few nights a week, while Karen nursed her beer and Jessica powered through Josie's cheapest rail specials. Then all of a sudden it was the night before Valentine's and Jessica caught herself becoming invested in the outcome of the Rangers' game playing on the staticky television over the bar.

"Shit," she swore to herself, drawing Karen's attention away from the little notebook she used during interviews.

"What?" the blonde asked, eyes a little glassy, but not yet drunk.

"I've become a hockey fan," Jessica groaned, trying and failing to keep her eyes from drifting back to the screen over Karen's shoulder.

" _What?_ " Karen repeated.

"We're regulars, Karen," Jessica spat. "We come here so often I'm actually following the fucking ice-capades."

Jessica gestured behind Karen, who turned to see what the P.I. was talking about, then flat out laughed.

"You're not a hockey fan, Jess. You're a drunk. And I say that with love," Karen said before her companion could argue with her. "So what if we never talk about why we're really here, and just keep getting drunk? Honestly, so what if we're regulars? It's better than the alternative. At least for me, anyway… Besides, it's not even playoffs."

Jessica studied Karen's face in a way that made her uncomfortable, totally disregarding for the moment the detail that Karen knew anything about hockey. Karen turned back to the notebook on the table, but she could still feel the calculating gaze on the top of her head.

"Huh," Jessica finally huffed.

"'Huh" what?" Karen asked without looking up.

"Nothing. You're just right. We don't ever talk about the alternatives," Jessica said before doubling down on her whiskey.

"Isn't that how we like it?" Karen asked, finally raising her piercing blue eyes to Jessica's green ones.

They exchanged one of those looks. One of _their_ looks. (If anyone bothered to ask Josie, there was even more unresolved tension between that blonde Karen girl and the dark-haired woman than there had been between Karen and the blind lawyer. But no one asked Josie about those sorts of things.)

"Yes, yes it is," Jessica affirmed, clinking her empty glass against Karen's beer before stalking off to the bar for a refill.

1471

Neither of them were particularly that far-gone, but Jessica had insisted on walking Karen home, in her nonchalant yet abrasive way, and Karen hadn't felt strongly enough to keep the P.I. from following her in. It was a little strange to have the raven-haired woman in her apartment without it turning into a camp-out on the bathroom floor.

"Tea?" she offered, sweeping into the kitchen to make herself some. Jessica examined the spines of the books on her shelves.

"Meh," Jessica offered, then "sure."

Jessica looked out of place. A dark spot amidst the scant clutter of Karen's everyday life. Not that it was a bad thing. It just sort of _was_ a thing with Jessica. She always wore dark or tattered clothes, and that leather jacket no matter the weather. Her eyes were often hooded, and her gaze was a warning to the world. There was so much going on in there, Karen was sure, but it took a lot for anyone to get Jessica to open up. But they weren't really all that different, she and Karen.

The blonde journalist's eyes followed the P.I. as she drifted around the little apartment until the electric kettle switched off.

While Karen busied herself with setting out mugs and fishing tea bags out of the drawer, Jessica reciprocated her silent appraisal.

Karen was a strong woman, with an open and confident veneer. There was a tiny self-consciousness about her, though, that sometimes made Jessica want to shout "you're pretty, get used to it!" And when she was deep in thought, she often looked just a little bit haunted. On that note, Jessica could understand why, given the rich backstory she'd uncovered after the untimely demise of her horned ally. Jessica wondered if the danger Karen had found herself in since Matt Murdock disappeared at the bottom of a very deep hole was the blonde's version of grief. She wondered if Karen would be out chasing even more danger if Jessica hadn't diverted her toward alcoholism instead.

Karen slid a mug of peppermint tea across the kitchen table toward Jessica, who dropped into a chair and pulled a flask from her jacket pocket. Karen rolled her blue eyes when Jessica poured whiskey into her cup, but reached across the table in a silent request for the flask all the same.

"This is good, actually," she said as she sipped the boozy tea. Jessica just nodded with an expression of "I told you so" on her face – even though she hadn't said anything.

Karen drained her cup, wandered away, and returned in her faded red flannel pajamas with her interview notebook back in her hand. She poured herself another mug of tea, this one without whiskey, and quietly read over her notes, chewing her lip and occasionally jotting down a new thought. And completely ignored Jessica.

After half an hour, Jessica had exhausted her tea and her flask and begun to yawn. Karen finally looked up, suppressing her own yawn behind her hands.

"Are you staying?" she asked, meeting Jessica's green eyes with a hint of something challenging.

Jessica yawned again. "I should go," she said, but didn't move. Karen was tempted to roll her eyes, but they were too tired even for that all of a sudden.

"Jess, you're staying."

2060


End file.
